


Bigger Than These Bones

by feverbeats



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:48:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21826978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feverbeats/pseuds/feverbeats
Summary: Sometimes Harrow imagines Gideon as a gallant prince, kissing her hand instead of punching her in the face. But that image is nauseating, and the punching has its own appeal. It's something Harrow knows how to respond to. She finds herself hungry for it in a way she can't imagine being hungry for gallantry. She deserves to be punched and Gideon deserves whatever horrible web Harrow can weave in return.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 20
Kudos: 146
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Bigger Than These Bones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sternerstuff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sternerstuff/gifts).



**2nd: discipline**

Gideon's eyes burn. She's running on maybe two hours of sleep, which is half her fault and half not. She stayed up later than she should have staring at a new magazine that made its way to her (a Cohort thing, not anything else, thanks). Then she woke up when everything was still fully dark because of a terrible moaning noise.

Now she's sitting in her cell debating whether she's about to see something she really doesn't want to see, or whether there's a monster to fight. There's never been a monster at Drearburh (except for Harrow, ha), but she lives in eternal hope.

She gets up and gets her sword. If she gets in a battle to the death with an enormous monster, she wants to die looking like a badass.

The moaning comes and goes, pausing and resuming with an eerie, pulsating quality. Gideon again considers, for a horrible second, that it might be a sex thing. That would be both hilarious and so awful. There's literally no single person here that she wants to see doing anything like that.

She walks down the hallway, sword held at the ready. If it's a monster and she cuts it into tiny pieces and gets a heroic injury, it's all going to be worth missing sleep.

She reaches the end of the hall, right where it turns into the corner into a dusty alcove, and she stops. The noise has stopped, too. Gideon grips her sword, grins, and whips around the corner.

"What the fuck?" she says.

Harrow, who is standing in the alcove, jerks sharply and looks at Gideon, horrified. Her face is naked, no paint. It's also wet with tears.

"Oh no," Gideon says.

"No." Harrow's voice is a croak.

"What are you _doing?_ " Gideon demands. And oh shit, is she supposed to comfort Harrow? Is this the moment their relationship blooms into a beautiful friendship instead of a series of awful scraps in back corridors? If it is, Gideon is going to bury herself alive.

"I don't--I was asleep." Harrow's hands fly to her face. "Where's my--? What did you _do?_ "

Gideon is always gobsmacked by how Harrow finds a way to blame her for everything. Even if one big thing is her fault, does that mean all the little things are, too?

"You were sleepwalking, idiot," she says. "I didn't do anything."

Harrow's expression darkens. "If you ever tell anyone about this--If you dare--"

"Wow, spit it out," Gideon says. She shoulders her sword. What an incredibly disappointing lack of monster. She can definitely lop off heads and limbs and tentacles, but she still doesn't know what to do with Harrow crying and yelling at her.

"I'm going to kill you in your sleep," Harrow says furiously. She always gets so nasty when she's caught off guard, especially because it's rare. Her skinny shoulders are shaking with rage or cold or fear, and Gideon can tell, because her black--nightgown? Shift?--actually covers less than 90% of her body, which is unreal. It's too bad Harrow is a hideous monster.

"You can't kill me in my sleep if I never sleep," Gideon says triumphantly.

Harrow just stares at her like Gideon is a dead animal. Then she turns and storms off down the hall.

Gideon can't get back to sleep, naturally, so she just sits up trying to imagine what Harrow is going to do to her for the crime of seeing her express a feeling. It's definitely going to be nothing compared to how shitty Gideon already feels about it.

**3rd: a jewel or a smile**

Harrow sometimes thinks about what a friend would be like. She's aware of the concept, broadly--someone you do things with, talk to. But there's nothing to do here, and what would she even say to someone? There's nothing to talk about that doesn't start with guilt or shame.

There's not even any content regarding friendship in the books she reads. Her reading list starts and ends with necromancy.

There is one book. It's not hers. It's something of Gideon's, babyish and immature, like everything about Gideon. It's a book of old stories, pre-Resurrection stories, for children. Or presumably for children. Harrow has no context for that, either.

In most of the stories, there are princes and princesses--Harrow understands royalty--who fall in love. Harrow feels queasy when she even imagines a prince, or love, or any of those things, but sometimes the mechanics of the magic and revenge in the stories strike home.

But there are times (increasingly rare) when Gideon reminds her a little of those stories. Gideon, who has rippling muscles (or, all right, muscles--they do what all muscles do, and Harrow understands what that is better than most) and a misplaced but very present sense of honor. If she didn't have the latter, she wouldn't be so easy to trick into corners and hurt the same way multiple times in a row.

Sometimes Harrow imagines Gideon as a gallant prince, kissing her hand instead of punching her in the face. But that image is nauseating, and the punching has its own appeal. It's something Harrow knows how to respond to. She finds herself hungry for it in a way she can't imagine being hungry for gallantry. She deserves to be punched and Gideon deserves whatever horrible web Harrow can weave in return.

Harrow can't see herself in the princes and princesses. The Ninth doesn't have royalty. The Reverend Daughter is not supposed to be a princess, and what a relief, because Harrow would crumble into bone dust if somebody asked her to step into that role. She's a serious person with a serious duty.

Sometimes there are wretched witches in the stories, living alone, curled in on themselves in self-hatred, netting the young royals in clever traps that ultimately fail and fall through. Harrow is mortified, blushing bright red under her paint the first time she reads one of these stories. She can do better than that. She has to do better.

Sometimes Gideon will give her a mocking bow and Harrow has to stop her heart from seizing and melting in her chest with shame and rage. She knows they're not characters in a storybook--and the stories that grow here are unlike the ones in Gideon's book--but for a moment, she feels nailed to the spot with horror at how badly she's failing at everything in her life.

Harrow doesn't think anyone in the Ninth has read the stories. Just in case they do and look at her differently, she burns the book. Gideon rages at her for a week afterwards, and Harrow feels a little better.

**4th: fidelity**

Gideon know she has a lot of flaws. She's the strongest, coolest person in the Ninth (probably!), but she can be petty and emotional and gullible.

And she keeps giving Harrow chances. Harrow is a nasty wreck, but it's not like either of them has anybody else.

So when Harrow finds her one afternoon and says, "You, Griddle, I need something from you," Gideon stupidly listens. She doesn't say "Go fuck youself." She doesn't punch Harrow in the face. She just lets her talk.

"I need you to wait for me tonight, outside the Locked Door. I think I've been sleepwalking again, and I need to be sure."

It's been two years since Gideon last caught Harrow sleepwalking (a terrible memory that she just wants to scrub from her mind), so that's a nasty surprise.

"Why not Crux?" Gideon asks. "Why not Ortus? He'd love to sit up all night shivering and waiting for you." She gives a little eyebrow wiggle, but her heart isn't in it.

"Nobody else knows it's ever happened," Harrow snaps. "Do you understand how humiliating it is to be--I'm not in control of myself when it happens."

Gideon gets it. Obviously she's going to leave this to the person whose opinion matters the least. Harrow could turn up naked and it wouldn't matter, as long as the only person who saw her was Gideon. That's a thought that's horrible in its own right.

"Yuck," Gideon says.

"What?" Harrow demands. "Are you going to do it, or not? I just need you to tell me if it's happening."

This can't be about Harrow trusting her, so clearly Gideon is missing something else. Maybe Harrow is just that obsessed with how she looks to other people. "Okay, "Gideon says. "I'll lose out on sleep so you don't have to."

Somewhere in there, she should have asked for a trade-off, but it didn't occur to her.

She spends the night shivering at the top of the stairs, as far as she can get from the Locked Door while still being able to see it. After the first hour, her hands are numb. She always gets the creeps walking by here, and it's much worse sitting all night. It doesn't occur to her until the fourth hour that maybe Harrow has set her up. It seems petty, but Harrow is incredibly petty. They're alike in that fun way. She keeps wondering if Harrow did something worse, something potentially lethal, like set her up to look like she was doing something to the Tomb.

But the hours path and nothing happens.

By morning, Gideon is stiff with cold and sitting still. No amount of midnight pushups could have saved her. When she sees Harrow, Harrow has dark shadows under her eyes that resemble Gideon's. They're obvious even under the paint, which is thicker than usual, and some design Gideon can't identify. Probably Nun of the Locked Tomb With a Stick Up Her Ass or similar.

"I didn't sleepwalk last night, then," Harrow says stiffly. "Maybe tonight you could--"

"Go fuck yourself," Gideon says, getting it right this time.

**5th: debts to the dead**

Harrow knows that what she dreams about when she sleepwalks is wrong. She knows it in the same way that she knows most of the other things she does are wrong. She knows it to her core, in the meat of her, the parts she likes to pretend don't exist. She knows it in her bones, lousy with energy she can only control when she's awake.

When she sleepwalks, she dreams of what she saw in the Locked Tomb. Or rather, the Tomb Unlocked, its contents laid bare to the stupid little girl who was foolish enough to walk inside.

Tonight, the other girl, the one who lies in the Tomb, leads Harrow through the chilly halls of Drearburh, silent as always. Harrow follows, shivering. Her face is bare, but in the dream, it doesn't matter. She can feel every inch of herself, the living blood of her, her body doing its work. It feels as if she's the only living thing in the whole of the Ninth.

The girl turns to take them down a hallway Harrow doesn't remember or recognize, and she hesitates, but only for a moment. Harrow feels she owes it to the girl to follow her, since Harrow disturbed her sleep. Since Harrow distrubed everything here.

When she turns the corner, they're almost completely in the dark. Harrow can feel her pulse points throbbing, and she wants to die. It's a disgusting, choking feeling. Her fingers are freezing and she's feverish inside. She suddenly feels like she's missed a step, and she's caught up in something she didn't realize was happening. She can't see the other girl in the dark, but she can see her shape.

Harrow is suddenly drowning in fear, cortisol flooding her body. She's at the mercy of her senses. All she can think of is reaching for the girl and finding herself holding something else, something terrible. She can't make herself move.

Here in the dark, the only living person in Drearburh, she also feels free. She's not indebted to anyone, she has no past, no future, no duty. She's not the Reverend Daughter, she's just Harrow.

Harrow is allowed to want something.

She reaches out, swimming through the fear, and touches the other girl's arm. It feels warm, not like a corpse should. She closes her eyes and draws close, feeling the girl from the Tomb pull her against her body. They're both warm after all. It's a shock.

Harrow tilts her chin up, and before she realizes it, she's kissing her.

Harrow's heart lurches in her chest. Even though a part of her knows it's a dream, she's still ashamed, disgusted, horrified. She can't pick out what pieces are of this are wrong and a mistake. The fact that the other girl is dead ranks low on the list. The fact that she's the death of the Emperor matters more.

But when Harrow pulls back, sick enough to want to stop, it's light enough to see, and she's not kissing the girl from the Tomb at all. She's kissing someone taller, with red hair and muscles.

She wakes up furious and turned on. She lies in bed until the feeling goes away.

**6th: truth**

Gideon doesn't give a shit about most things.

Yeah, she doesn't believe it either. She cares way too much, and she's also terrible at hiding it. She's learned fast not to talk too much about the things she cares about, but some of it's unavoidable. If she doesn't make her Cohort dreams known, she's never going to get there. Besides, she thinks Aiglamene is secretly cheering for her.

She learned early on not to ask about her mother. Harrow was so relentlessly cruel that it made Gideon feel sick.

LIke it or not, though, there's nobody else her age around, and Harrow is something else she ends up caring about, the way you'd care about a bad dog that bit you all the time, because at least it was your dog.

Not that Harrow belongs to Gideon. But she doesn't _not_ belong to her.

Gideon is bored of her mind one night, so she goes to Harrow's cell. That's stupid right off the bat, but Gideon is great at stupid. Harrow is sitting up reading one of her necromancy books. There's ink on her face, which Gideon absolutely does not let her know about.

"Hey, Nonagesimus," Gideon says. "Let's play a game."

Harrow looks at her like she's dirt. Only that's being generous.

"It's called truth or dare," Gideon says boldly. "The way you--"

"I know," Harrow snaps. "It's obvious from the name. And it's not something I have any interest in. What's the matter, Griddle, tired of playing games you can't win?"

Honestly, yes. Gideon can't think ten steps ahead the way Harrow can, and there are so many things she can't punch of stab her way out of. It would have been nice to win. "Just one round?" she says. "You can go first."

Harrow tilts her head to one side, considering. Maybe she's trying to think of something that won't result in Gideon getting a turn. Maybe she'll dare Gideon to decapitate herself.

"Fine," Harrow says shortly. "Go on."

"Dare," Gideon says.

"Of course." Harrow rolls her eyes. "All right. I dare you to tell Ortus you're in love with him."

Gideon stares at her, horrified. " _No_ ," she says.

"Yes," Harrow says smugly. "You can do it tomorrow, if you like. He's already asleep."

"Fine," Gideon says. "You wait. I'll make it worse for you. I'll make a production of it." Maybe she'll read Ortus a poem. He likes poetry.

"My turn," Harrow says. "Truth."

There are a lot of ways Gideon could have imagined this evening going, when she was idly thinking about it back in her own cell. She imagined Harrow telling her something true about her mother, although how Harrow would know better than Gideon when she's even younger is a mystery. She imagined daring Harrow to take her top off, which would maybe start off as humiliating and hilarious and then, as Gideon thought about it, become something else.

Now that they're here, her mouth is suddenly dry, and all she can think to say is, "What the hell, Nonagesimus? What's your deal with me?"

Harrow looks at her with those fathomless black eyes. Then she says, "You don't have to tell Ortus anything."

**7th: beauty**

Harrow doesn't have an eye for beauty. Nothing in the Ninth is very beautiful, depending on your definition. Harrow finds a bit of necromancy done well to be lovely in its way, but that's not the same thing. And since there are no other girls her age, there's very little reason for her to think about beauty at all.

( _No_ other girls isn't quite right. There's one, and there's the body in the Tomb.)

It comes as a horrible shock to her, when in the middle of an argument with Gideon, Gideon says something nightmarish.

Harrow can't remember what the fight was about originally. They're both alone in the echoing Lesser Chapel, both warm with anger. Harrow is starting to feel aware of her body again, just like in the revolting dreams she sometimes has while sleepwalking.

"You really think you're better than me," Gideon says loudly. "Like you can boss me around."

"You do whatever I tell you," Harrow says. She's losing her composure a little, and that won't do. It's part of how she maintains the upper hand. "Can I be blamed for treating you like that?

Gideon snorts. "God, just because you're kind of a babe in the right light, that doesn't mean you can be a dick and a half, you know?"

"What?" Harrow says stiffly. It feels as if all her blood is congealing in her veins.

"What?" Gideon says.

They stare at each other, and Harrow feels like they could just go on saying what for quite a while before either of them felt like moving on. That anyone could think that about Harrow--let alone that _Gideon_ could think it--chills her fully through.

"Well, now I said it," Gideon says. "Don't worry, I still hate your guts. It's just hormones."

For some reason, those words unfreeze Harrow. Just hormones. Something in the body, which means it can be controlled. Given a moment, she can take the feeling and wring it out of herself.

But it will take a moment. Now, with her hormones still in control, she reaches out across the space between them and grabs Gideon's collar.

Gideon, maybe too surprised, doesn't move. Harrow kisses her, their teeth clicking together awkwardly. Gideon makes a strangled noise. They cling together for a moment, and all Harrow can think of is that if they both hate it, they can't possibly still be doing it.

Gideon gets her hands on Harrow's waist somewhere in there, and that's terrible, too, but neither of them is in control, clearly. Harrow is lightheaded with how much she hates it. She can feel her paint smudging. Gideon's hands are _so big._

When they pull away, they do it at the same time.

"What the _fuck?_ " Gideon says breathlessly. "What, what, what?"

"The hormones," Harrow gasps. "But I have control of them now. Griddle, you can't really believe I'd want to kiss you, do you? Don't be disgusting." With that garbled mess of an explanation, Harrow flees.

**8th: salvation**

Gideon forgets the kiss as quickly as she possibly can. It wasn't a good kiss, and Harrow is not a good person. She's not even a babe; Gideon has no idea where that came from. Her mouth just runs away from her sometimes. She knows there'll be a punishment of some kind though, and she's tensed for it for a week.

Unrelated to that, Gideon wants out. She just can't figure out what that looks like if Harrow is the gatekeeper to any possible road out of here. Someone who hates her so much should not want her to stay. Harrow hating her and wanting her to die in a hole is really cramping her style in every aspect of life.

Instead of getting out, Gideon gets more and more depressed. She doesn't know that's what's going on at first, and by the time it occurs to her that she's just incredibly sad and hopeless, all she can do is lie in bed wondering if someone will bring her food. 

Nobody does. Finally, though, after about a day and a half, Harrow shows up. She's in full Harrow mode, paint perfect, wearing black head to toe. Gideon hasn't seen her up close since the kiss. Not that she's been avoiding her, but it happens. Gideon groans and looks up at her.

"Are you dying?" Harrow demands, her voice ringing with bored authority. She's getting better at the one Gideon thinks of it as her Reverend Daughter voice. "If you are, tell me now, so we can hurry it up and put your skeleton to good use."

"I'm sick," Gideon lies.

Harrow is silent for a moment. Then she says, "Good. You should be. Sick how?"

"I don't know," Gideon says. "Did you put a curse on me?"

Harrow is quiet again. Maybe she has something wrong with her brain. That would be great and cheer Gideon up immensely.

"I heard you weren't training," she says. "It won't be much fun to set traps for you if you're going to be so easily caught. And it won't be satisfying to destroy if you're busy destroying yourself. You're not sick, you're being lazy. Get up."

Out of spite, Gideon doesn't.

"You do realize there's not point to you if you just lie around all day," Harrow says. Gideon doesn't respond to that, either.

Harrow lifts her foot and kicks Gideon hard in the shoulder with a pointed shoe. "Fine," she says, "but I'm going to send an army of constructs to visit you in about twenty minutes. It's up to you what you do with that information. Personally, I hope they pound you into a powder."

She goes. Gideon lies there debating how badly she does or doesn't want to be pounded into a powder. It would be a ticket out of here, although not the one she would have chosen. And she'd never had to look at Harrow's hideous face again.

The only thing that makes Gideon get up, ultimately, is that idea that staying in bed means Harrow will have won.

**9th: the tomb**

Harrow wants out. And she has a plan. It's a bad plan, and doomed to fail, but if she just keeps herself together, she can at least the first few lurching steps toward freedom.

The plan obsesses her. The sleepwalking stops. Harrow sleeps like the dead. She doesn't dream. Everything in her head feels as if it's being scrubbed clean, stripped down to the essential parts she needs in order to function.

But when she looks at Gideon, she feels rage and shame rising up again, tangled together from so many sources (the kiss, the dream, the Tomb, the nooses), choking her. She feels made of flesh and bone, horribly corporeal and disgusting. The tight control she's been gathering within herself unravels.

The truth is, Harrow has done a terrible thing. No, Harrow _is_ a terrible thing. And when she's with Gideon, she can't forget.

She sometimes entertains the notion of what her life would have been like if she hadn't been a terrible thing. If there had been other children in the Ninth. If she hadn't chosen to break into the Locked Tomb. If the rock had not been rolled away.

Would she and Gideon and have friends? What does friendship even look like? Would they still have kissed in the Lesser Chapel? In the dream that was hopefully not a sleepwalking reality? Would there have been something between them that didn't taste like ash and acid?

Harrow hopes not. The idea that there was something better out there to be lost is too searingly painful to bear. She'd rather believe that they were made to hate each other from a distance of a foot or so, and to die with their hands around each other's throats. It would be worse to think that Harrow had lost something before she had a chance to do anything about it. Having it be fate, or mistakes she had made, that's easier. That's familiar. If she messed something up between them, it would only make sense.

Gideon does keep giving her these wounded looks, now that Harrow is getting so much better at hurting her, and at keeping her here. She wants to explain why that's so necessary, now that there's a reason. But maybe then Gideon would ask why Harrow had kept her there before the Emperor's invitation, and Harrow would be choking on ash again. She feels sick when she even tries to explain it to herself.

Gideon seems to have gotten over her depression. Now she's mouthy and determined again, and Harrow clings to the battle between them like a lifeline. There's nothing to fuck up there, because it's already so fucked up. She can live in the conflict and thrive. She can move forward fueled by hate and necromancy done with clinical precision, and she doesn't have to feel anything at all, in her body or any other part of her where feelings might be festering.

She tries to see Gideon as more of a thug and less of a prince. It's not hard. Gideon is rude, and crass, and in the right light--Well, the light is never very good here.


End file.
